by Holt, Tom
Julie
JDCB? He had to think for a while before he figured it: Judy di Castel’Bianco. Vindictive cow, he thought. There was absolutely no way he was going to be able to wade through all that garbage in one afternoon. More to the point, it looked like he’d be there till midnight, at the very least. Still, it wasn’t as though he had any choice in the matter. If she wanted to put him in his place by giving him a double detention, she could do that. Bugger .
At half-past five, Paul’s attention was disturbed by scratching sounds at the door. The goblins were used to having the run of the place once the front door had been shut. The light on in his office was probably bugging the hell out of them. He scowled, took out the Sea Scouts badge and jerked the door open. Sure enough, on the other side were two or three goblins, crouched down where they’d been trying to peer through the keyhole.
‘Sorry, chaps,’ Paul said sternly. ‘This office is off limits for tonight.’ When the nearest goblin lifted its head and growled at him, he stuck out his hand with the badge in it, and slowly opened his fingers. The result was instantaneous and really rather pleasing. He’d heard the expression falling over each other in their haste many times, but he hadn’t realised before what an amusing spectacle it could be. Grinning broadly, he shut the door.
Six o’clock; six-thirty; seven. He was tired, and hungry, and very, very bored, and he was still only just over halfway through. He felt a yawn bubbling up inside him, like a belch of lava welling up from the magma level into the throat of a volcano. Can’t fall asleep, he told himself, can’t go sleep, got to finish or be here all night —
The pile of Mortensen printouts was actually rather comfortable to rest one’s head on. The infinite layers formed a wonderful laminated cushion. A bright spark could make money patenting . . .
Paul could see the office very clearly, which was odd since he knew his eyes were closed. He could see himself, zizzing happily. He looked so peaceful like that, he decided, it’d be a crime to wake him.
The door opened; but not the boring old everyday door in the door frame. This door appeared suddenly out of the wall, and it looked rather familiar. I know that door, he thought, I’d know it anywhere. A door that appears out of nowhere, coming through the wall. When is a door not a door? Easy—
But that was odd too, because he’d lent Ricky Wurmtoter the Acme Portable Door, his wonderful secret get-out-ofmortal-peril-free gadget; and Ricky had got himself captured. Maybe this was Ricky coming home, with Benny and Monika.
Wrong. The door swung open wide; an arm reached out through it, and wedged it open with a thick heavy book, which Paul recognised as the office-procedures manual. It wasn’t a particularly frightening arm; it wasn’t green and scaly or grey with shrivelled skin clinging to the bone. In fact, it was wearing lilac, with patterns in silver glitter. A kid’s arm.
Followed, a second later, by a kid. Paul wasn’t terribly good at telling children apart, but he knew this one. The name escaped him, but he remembered that she was a real hotshot with a box spanner and a torque wrench. Behind her came the other half-dozen or so kids he’d seen at the garage in the middle of nowhere; behind them, at least thirty children he didn’t recognise. School trip, he assumed, or someone’s birthday treat. No grown-ups, though. Still, it was only a dream, so sod it.
Paul could see them looking cautiously at him, checking he really was fast asleep before tiptoeing past him, round the corner of his desk towards the door. The thing that struck him most about them was how very unchildlike they were, in spite of their round pink faces, out-of-proportion heads and scuffed knees. No child that age has lived long enough to have learned how to move so silently, so carefully, so earnestly. It was like watching commandos, or the SAS, not a crocodile of truant nine- and ten-year-olds. Not kids; something else, pretending to be human children. Eeek, he thought, creepy. Glad I’m asleep and don’t have to see this.
He counted them: forty-eight.
When the last one had emerged from it, the Portable Door rolled itself neatly into a scroll, fell to the floor and vanished. The children, meanwhile, were sneaking out of the office. The last one closed the door softly behind her. Then Paul woke up.
According to his watch it was nearly nine o’clock. Fuck, he thought; for all I know, Countess Judy’s already buggered off, and I’m stuck in the building all night. One thing was fairly certain: there was no way he was going to finish this pile of printouts now. If he tried, he was certain he’d be asleep again in five minutes. All he could think of to do was go straight to Countess Judy’s office, and if she was still there, admit his failure and ask to be let out of the office. If she wasn’t there— He’d been rather dismissive of the threat posed by goblins earlier, possibly because at the back of his mind he’d known that he had the Sea Scout badge. Query, however: would the badge, coupled with his fearsome reputation as a scarer of goblins, be enough to save him from having his throat cut in his sleep? Good question, to which he really didn’t want to learn the answer.
All in all, he was enormously relieved to see a wedge of light showing under the Countess’s door. Paul took a deep breath, and knocked.
No answer. He waited, counted to fifty, knocked again. This time, the Countess’s voice snapped ‘Come in,’ and he turned the handle.
‘Mr Carpenter,’ she said. She was looking sterner and more intimidating than he’d ever seen her; her cheekbones were sharp as ploughshares, and her eyes were cold and silvery grey. For all that, something he saw out of the corner of his eye distracted him.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Paul said, ‘but I haven’t managed to finish the Mortensens you sent down. I promise I’ll stay late tomorrow—’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you will. And now, I suppose, I’d better let you out. Follow me.’
As Paul left the office, however, he couldn’t resist glancing quickly round, just for a lightning-fast peek. When he’d entered the room, he’d seen the drawer of the Countess’s filing cabinet – the same one he’d manhandled all over the place for Julie a few days back – twitch, then close silently, all by itself. Now, as he left, he could see it very slowly and tentatively slide open. Furthermore, he had a pretty strong feeling that he wasn’t supposed to have seen anything of the kind.
Paul could hardly keep his eyes open on the bus home; but as soon as he unlocked his front door, he felt wide awake. All night, sleep evaded him like the last unpaired sock in the drawer. Counting sheep was pointless, counterproductive even; all he saw when he closed his eyes was a gaggle of schoolkids tiptoeing through a hole in his office wall. He tried turning on the TV, since television hardly ever failed to put him to sleep; but even the Open University, Channel Four arts programmes and reruns of Martial Law couldn’t do the trick. He drifted off for a few minutes around five a.m. but was jerked awake by a loud bang. For some reason he imagined it was the slamming of a door, but it turned out to be nothing more than generic Arab baddies blowing up something or other in the course of some ineffable thriller. In desperation, he dragged himself to his feet and did an hour and a half of ironing before running himself a consolatory bath.
It turned into the dreariest week of Paul’s life. When he arrived at the office, the Mortensen mountain had at least doubled, and on his chair was a terse note from Countess Judy reminding him that he’d undertaken to clear the lot before leaving the building. Unfortunately, his rate of progress soon slowed from pathetic to derisory, as the sleep that had avoided him all night came swooshing back like an angry tide. No matter what he tried – quadruple black coffee from the machine, pinching his arms, stabbing the point of the scissors into the palms of his hands – nothing could induce his eyes to stay open once he focused them on a sheaf of Mortensens. It had to be some kind of self-induced hypnotism, he reckoned – a smart conclusion which, once arrived at, didn’t appear to help in the slightest. Three times before lunch, Julie caught him in mid-doze; each time the first he knew about it was the soft click of the door, and there she’d be, standing over him with
a look of contempt on her face and yet more bloody printouts.
‘You’re not making a very good job of this, are you?’ she said the fourth time.
Waking up just the conventional once a day was bad enough for Paul, who wasn’t a morning person. Being exploded out of slumberland over and over again in the space of a few hours—
‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘Dunno what the problem is, really.’
The click of Julie’s tongue was like a Prussian officer’s heels on a parade ground. ‘Staying up all night boozing and partying, and being in no fit state to come into work,’ she snapped. ‘Just don’t let Mr Tanner catch you, that’s all. Otherwise, you’ll be looking for a new job by the end of the week.’
Please, Paul thought, pretty please. Pretty please with pink icing and ribbon. ‘Couldn’t sleep last night,’ he tried feebly to explain. ‘Overtired, probably. Maybe I’m coming down with something.’ Julie didn’t dignify that with a reply, and Paul couldn’t really blame her. If he’d repeatedly walked in and found someone zonked out on the desk each time, he too would’ve naturally assumed that the burning smell in the air was both ends of the candle, remorselessly incinerated by a hopeless debauchee.
When lunchtime eventually dragged round, he toyed with the idea of nipping out and getting some fresh air, but the ghastly thought of what’d be said to him if Countess Judy dropped by while he was out and found the snow-capped Mortensen range ungarrisoned was more than he could bear. He stayed at his post, struggled, and slept. Occasionally, he caught snatches of dreams (it was a bit like switching on the last five minutes of a film); sometimes there were kids sneaking through doors, sometimes he was in the main boardroom (the one with the imp-reflecting table top) with old Mr Wells, the senior partner, trying to explain the whole wretched business to him but unable to make himself understood because he’d caught the office cold and was constantly interrupted by a barrage of artillery-grade sneezing. In one dream he was in the land of the dead. He’d gone to do the banking as usual but Melze had wandered off and got herself trapped in the dungeons of Grendel’s Aunt, he’d dashed off to find help and got completely lost, and now he was being chased across the asphodel fields by a pack of his relatives (led by Uncle Ernie) all howling like dogs and demanding to know why he never answered letters.
‘This isn’t good enough,’ Countess Judy told Paul at eight o’clock that night, when he’d reported in to confess a second day of failure. ‘Go home, go straight to bed, get some sleep, and be damned sure you get the job finished tomorrow. That’s all I can say.’
But that night was just as bad as the night before, and the night after: no sleep, just aching, intolerable boredom. Paul tried the fresh-air approach at lunchtime the next day, walking briskly through the City until his feet were blistered, but the only result was deeper gloom and further despair; every time he passed a child or a group of children in the street (and either there were an awful lot of them out and about during the daytime or he was noticing them more than usual) he could’ve sworn blind that he recognised their nasty, grinning faces from his fragmented dreams. He didn’t need to be a doctor to figure that one out; sleep deprivation, stress, with a light overall garnish of loathing and terror. Not the best week of his life so far.
Paul’s luck broke on Friday night. He’d been given one last chance: work all weekend and get the backlog cleared before it formed a critical mass and screwed up the Earth’s orbit, or else. Resigned to not sleeping yet again, he’d resolved to pass the time by painting the living-room ceiling. He’d got the furniture covered in old sheets, set up the ladder and dipped his little squidgy foam mop in white emulsion when quite suddenly his eyes closed, and nothing he could do would induce them to open again. He groped his way to the dust-sheet-strewn sofa – he felt the emulsion tray get kicked over en route, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that – and flopped down with the mop still in his hand. When his eyes eventually opened, the room was full of light and his watch said 9:15.
Paul just made it to St Mary Axe by ten, which was his appointed time. He was still wearing Friday’s clothes, stylishly though eccentrically enhanced by a big white rectangle on the left knee of his trousers. Countess Judy gave him a very quick glance, held the door open for him and went away without a word. Even the goblins gave him a wide berth; as he approached, the little knots and gangs of them he encountered in the corridors and on the stairs immediately went very quiet and backed hastily away, which he reckoned was a bit much. Needless to say, none of them came anywhere near him all day.
But, at a quarter past eleven that night, Paul carefully laid the last printout on the last pile, taking exaggerated care to line its edges up perfectly with the sheet underneath. He could feel his brain trying to force its way past his eyes and eardrums as it boiled and seethed with boredom, but he’d got the job done and he hadn’t fallen asleep once. In spite of everything, he couldn’t help feeling – yes, dammit, actual genuine pride. Something ludicrously pointless and stupid attempted, something done. Go tell the Spartans, and all that.
He stood up – his legs appeared to have forgotten how to do the standing-up business, and it was a second or so before it came back to them – and spent a whole two minutes just gazing at the vast array of neat, orderly paper bundles. Thank God, he thought, that my office hasn’t got a window, because this is precisely the moment in every comedy film ever made where a sudden gust of wind scatters the lot —
Not wind, sure; but goblins. Goblins with the run of the place, dozens or even hundreds of malignant scampering non-humans who most of all just wanna have fun, preferably by breaking and spilling things. The mental image was more than he could bear. But, just as Paul had resigned himself to standing guard until Monday morning, inspiration struck. He took his Sea Scout badge, gave it a quick buff on his lapel, and laid it on top of the bundle nearest the door.
Joy, he thought. Joy isn’t anything I’ve imagined it to be over the last twenty-odd years. It’s not Christmas or true love or chocolate ice cream or even getting out of the dungeons of the Fey. It’s finishing this. Something so simple, yet so unspeakably wonderful.
Paul was just about to turn off the light when he stopped, went over to the long blank wall opposite his chair and studied it, inch by inch. Nothing there, needless to say. No goblin scratches, no faint warmth to the touch, no slight clamminess where something had adhered to it by suction, no faint lines or cracks in the plaster to indicate a cunningly hidden seam. Another aspect of this overriding joy: by Monday he’d be healed – he wouldn’t see doors in walls or be convinced that he knew the face of every bubblegumchomping brat he passed in the street. All he’d have to put up with would be talking bicycles, extortionate lawyers’ fees, the Bank of the Dead, his own shortcomings as a human being, and Mr Tanner’s mum. And he’d have Sunday off, as well.
Joy.
Paul shook his head, closed the door gently to avoid making a draught, and went home.
Chapter Ten
Sunday dissolved into dreamless sleep; no kids, no girls, no talking bicycles or bossy cars or chatty transport of any kind. When the alarm went on Monday morning, Paul tumbled out of bed feeling brighter and livelier than he could remember. He had a feeling that something horrible was now over, and he wouldn’t have to go back there again.
The Mortensen piles had vanished from his desk; it was clear, apart from a page torn out of a small notebook, with a few words scribbled on it in Countess Judy’s preying-mantis handwriting:
PAC—
Work satisfactory. See Christine, regards office management assignment.
JDCB
Fine, Paul thought. He knew what office management meant in JWW-speak: shifting furniture, or helping with the photocopying, or replacing the starter motor in the fluorescent lighting tubes. Any one of the above was vastly preferable to sorting Mortensen printouts, so he fairly sprinted up the stairs to find out what he had to do.
‘That filing cabinet,’ Christine explained.
Paul nod
ded. ‘It’s in Countess di Castel’Bianco’s office now, isn’t it?’
Christine frowned. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Fancy you knowing that. Anyhow, it’s got to come out of there and go into the cashier’s room. You won’t be able to manage it all by yourself on the stairs, though.’
‘I could try,’ Paul said, trying to sound feeble and undernourished.
‘What, and chip all the paint in the stairwell? No, I’ll give Mr Suslowicz a ring, he might have a minute or two.’
Much to Paul’s relief, Mr Suslowicz wasn’t there. Paul had only spoken to him a few times and on each occasion he’d found him unnervingly pleasant, for a partner; but he was still The Boss, not to mention a giant (albeit a rather short one). ‘Damn,’ Christine said. ‘Usually I get Benny Shumway to help with this sort of thing. I’d help you myself, but I did my back last week at aerobics, and it’s an enchanted filing cabinet, so you can’t just magic it, you’d probably blow up the building.’ She tutted for a moment or so. ‘This is a pain – the Countess told me to get it shifted this morning, priority.’
If it occurred to Paul to wonder why moving a filing cabinet into the cashier’s office was so important to a senior member of the partnership, he didn’t dwell on the issue. ‘How about Mr Tanner’s— Rosie,’ he amended quickly. ‘I mean, she’s a – They’re quite strong, aren’t they?’
Christine arched an eyebrow at him, but swivelled round to her phone and keyed a number. A minute or so later, the door opened and a petite, fragile-looking Chinese beauty walked in, wearing a pale blue silk dress and four-inch heels. Christine looked at her and clicked her tongue. ‘Thanks for helping out,’ she said tersely. ‘You might want to change, though. Wouldn’t want to risk you straining something.’
